Lessons

Lesson Info

Catalog Storage

show you my is my favorite automation for collections. I'm gonna open up a different catalog that I call my primary workflow template. So the way this works, you can't automate the creation of the collection sets in the collections in light room. So what you do is you build an empty catalogue that has one photograph in it, and then you build your collection set down below. So here's my actual workflow sample. Rename Me is to remind me to rename it once it comes into the main catalogue. But then here's the initial import picks and rejects than an editing round one round two final edit ings webs. What websites hasn't been potentially sent to Is it been in portfolio and has it been printed? Okay, so that's the workflow that I go through. I started the top my little just work my way down. He is a smart collections to kind of keep me organized. And then, if you look there is one photograph. It's really just a great bar created photo shop little J. Peg and it sits in there. The reason you ha...

ve to have the one photograph is it won't build the collection set on import without there being a photograph in every single one of the collections. So you take your one photograph and you put it in every one of the collections. You can see it's got a one there, what you think going to do? He's gonna come back in your main catalogue and then you're gonna import from another catalogue. You're gonna select that default template you made you click, choose, and then it's gonna ask you, Do you want to import the catalogue and the photos? You have to import the photo. That's why it's just a throwaway photograph. You click import it imports. And if we come down here, you will see there is the rename me Collection said. And there's although Fullers so I don't come in and build those over and over and over again. I little just import that now from, ah, commercial job from something else. They would come in potentially different way. So a number of different ways to do that. Okay, so if we jump back over to ah keynote now, I got a couple of things. We'll talk a little about stories you want, talk a little about cloud and then just kind of some high level workflow pieces. Um, storage. This is one of the things I get asked a lot about it. What's a store on how to store things? SSD drives regular hard drive raids. At the end of the day, you have a certain amount of data and you have probably a terabyte. You have megabytes. You have 17 terabytes. Whatever it is you need about 2 to 3 times the overhead for growth. So if you're right now, have a terabyte. You want to be on a four terabyte drive. That's kind of your You want to be 2 to 3 times the size you currently are at for growth. And then what matters is you need multiple copies of it. So if we only have one copy, things are gonna go really bad because of that Hard drive dies, it's over. If that's your memory card and you haven't got it under the computer, it's over. So the most dangerous time in photography, because when your only living on the one memory card when we get the memory card and we get it imported into the laptop and you put it to stay on your laptop. Cool, because now we have a second copy. So now at least of one of them dies, the other one's okay. When I'm traveling in shooting, I take enough memory cards with me so that I never shoot on the same memory card. They always make sure I've got them stored is an extra backup. And I take to external hard drives with me because ultimately you need three copies in a minimum. Three copies of your data means you're backed up mostly. The other thing that people do when they make the mistake is they have their stuff on their computers. They have a backed up. They've complained about how they've had to buy all these hard drives. They've done all the angst around that, and then they do a great job. They copy everything off their computer. They put it on their first hard drive. Then they copy to their second hard drive, and they're all proud of themselves. They have three copies. Then a lightning bolt hits their house. Power surges to the house and fries 123 Another laptop hard drives. You absolutely need your third copy to be off site or your fourth copy. Depending on how anal retentive you need to be, it needs to be offsite somehow just out of your own house. Even if you just went to your neighbor's house, that would be better than in your own house, cause if your house caught on fire, your neighbor's house likely isn't going to catch on fire. We live in an earthquake zone appear in Seattle, so the odds of my house and my neighbors health both suffering damage from the earthquake is significant. So I got to think about getting potentially out of the earthquake zone. So I've got to think about how to move all those different pieces around. And I also everything about how often do I need to have that data backed up? Because that's actually a lot of work free to plug in four different hard drives synchronizing, copy, do all that kind of stuff, So identify the problem again and something that I wanna be able to do every time. So I have software that actually does copying their several synchronizing programs that make file copies. I put in those things. They have little jobs they run, and once a week number one backs up the number two. Once a month, the offsite drive comes back and number one copies onto the external one. So it does that little loop every single time and moves through its cycle. I said You need three hard drives. One goes off site is why you need four hard drives because I got one off site. But when I bring it back to the house now, all the date is at the house. So it's basically this little rotation of that external last will drive that was driving me crazy. So this is where when we talk about the cloud, the off site peace for me has become ah, chunk of cloud storage. So but I've got to get that piece, the other pieces critical. We'll talk about this, a little cloud stories you have tohave what's called the check some when you're backing up your data. My analogy for this is if you've ever cooked food with a recipe and then it doesn't show up like the picture. That's what a check sum is. The check Something looks at a piece of data, and it goes to the piece of data after it's been copied and it makes sure that what was on A is exactly what is on being because the most critical time for a failure and the copy of the file is in that transfer from one drive to the other, and you've probably seen it. If you've been around digital photography and if you're loaded, J. Peg or Rafa and only like half of it will show up or some of the lines are missing. And it's just a great bar because the date has become corrupt and that's usually in the copy process. So what? The check some does is it goes back and goes, And then you know, I didn't get a real copy. You need to send that piece again to make sure I get an actual full copy. So we get that third piece of stories done. What is also important in that backup process of this is when you get the magic box at a light room that says, Do you want to back up or skip this time and everybody chooses Skip. This time you want to put that back up and those backups gets stored somewhere you want to make sure those get put on your drive that gets included in the copy off site as well, Because we're just back them up to your local laptop on your laptop died. You potentially lose all your backups for your light room catalog as well. So the light room backup. Also, we need to be included in that. If you're using bridge and you're using that and you're using the X and P files, and that's where all your metadata storage, you got to make sure you copy all those files or as well. So everything that's in the process has to move together. The question you ask yourself is, how much data can I lose? That's the only real question. Need to ask yourself, Can I lose a month of data? It was 1/4 of data. Gonna lose 1/2 a year of data plays a year of data. Can I never lose? This data was on the set of a movie set that was doing digital work. The amount of backups being made was insane on site, and they're like, This is a multi $1,000,000 production. Hard drives are cheap. The cost of bringing the entire crew back to film again so the amount of copies get made on site was amazing. That was all about. They can't afford to lose the data period. When I worked at Microsoft Data Centers, we had machines that literally had dozens and dozens of copies because there was certain data we couldn't lose. Most of it was when we were playing games, but there was other data that was important. Okay, when we talk about the cloud Ah, the cloud is one of those great tech words that is this nebulous thing that's kind of out there and everything is in the cloud. It's in the cloud. Um, so in general, cloud storage is just stuff that store outside your place. Start of another location hosted and run by 1/3 party Amazon. Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Facebook's a cloud company. You put your photographs up there, they're hosting your photographs. Some level of a cloud Google drive, the creative cloud stories that give you, ah, hands, all those different pieces, elements of the cloud. The cloud is actually a pretty good tool for some things, and it's not good for others. If you're gonna become 100% dependent on the cloud you miles will just go home and pretend like you don't have any hard drives. As great of a company's Google is his Microsoft is Adobe is as much as they don't want to do damage to their client relationships. We're at the whim of a software company. If your cloud hosted and everything's in the cloud and that company goes away, your data could be gone. I worked with a cloud company and little we got a male that said, You have 12 hours to pull your data off. We're out of money and they're shutting off the service in 12 hours. Now the other thing about the cloud is your dependent on their band with speed and your band with speed. We didn't have. We had the band with, but they didn't because everybody in their world was trying to get their date off. We end up not getting our data back, so being solely reliant on that would have been bad. So you want to make sure in that world you're thinking about all of those different elements. So the cloud I like to think of his insurance first and foremost I hate paying my insurance policy hated. I never want to use it. Never one activated, but that's what the cloud is. Is insurance in the event and Earthquake hits All my hard drives fried my laptops dead, my radar a All those Everything's air gone. It's the insurance policy. The second thing is it's remote access to the files. If I am somewhere else and I need to get to the files, I can log into Dropbox Google, drive somewhere and potentially download the files. I may not have access to light room, but if I was diligent enough about my metadata search my file naming all of those elements, I could potentially find the information. And it's also a great way to share with family, friends, clients, some level of that. So most of us is. Photographers are doing some level of cloud working. You've got a client and you put stuff in dropbox with them to see you're working with a cloud. On some level, it's the question of how integrated into the cloud do you want to be? Do you need all your files in the cloud? I have ah ah, photographer friend of mine. He's got somewhere the neighbor to seven million digital files. The cost alone to store those in the cloud would be tens of thousands of dollars a month. He's like It's not worth it. It's not worth putting seven million photographs up there. But if you only have 5000 photographs and you can store it up there and it's not an expensive charge, that might be a decent place to back up the data. Some of the files in the cloud that's me. I got a lot of files, but from a port full true portfolio standpoint. If the world ended tomorrow and there was an earthquake and I lost all my files, there's about 2 to 300 photographs that would break my heart. Those live in the cloud for me. I have a collection of light room that is my portfolio level stuff, and all I do is about every month. Click on it and I exported to a collection. Bring the photos with it. A catalog, the catalog, the photos all go up into the cloud. They sit there. It's a couple of 100. It doesn't cost me anything. Your data attention policy. How long you gonna store that stuff Lives in the cloud for a long time. You're gonna be up there for a long time to be paying for a long time, so that's becomes important. And then the last thing is, you got to check it. Just because you put in the cloud doesn't mean it's there. They'll tell you it's there, but they lie. They're liars. So once a month, once a week, once here, you need to pull down a big chunk, your photographs and make sure they're actually still up there and irretrievable. My friend Julian cost. Uh oh, that's back up for a whole computer. I never back in my whole computer because I got to reinstall the apse anyway, It takes forever. I would really just have the data backed up. Uploads be determined your access. If you're in a hotel in relying on the cloud, you're never gonna get your photos upgrade uploaded to the cloud. It's just going to slow, so you need a strong, consistent, connected Julian Cost says There's a reason they call it the cloud and not a sunshiny day. So you don't want to rely on the reliability because it can actually really be a problem. So don't make it. You're only failsafe piece, but it is an important component of your actual workflow